The fashion jewellery industry runs on layers. A piece made in a workshop in Thailand typically passes through an agent, an exporter, an importer, a distributor, and a retailer before it reaches a customer. Each layer is a business with its own margin, and each margin adds to the final price without adding anything to the piece itself.
ako & sila was built on the premise that this chain is unnecessary. Direct sourcing — finding makers, building relationships with workshops, and buying without intermediaries — is harder than ordering from a catalogue, but it produces a better outcome at both ends of the transaction.
What the layers cost
In a conventional supply chain, each intermediary typically adds 30–50% to the price of the previous layer. A piece that leaves a workshop for 100 THB might reach a retail shelf at 800 THB or more by the time every margin has been applied. The maker receives a fraction of the retail price. The customer pays a multiple of the source cost.
Direct sourcing compresses this. When there are no agents or distributors, the margin that would have gone to those layers either stays in the price (giving the customer better value at a given retail price) or reaches the maker (improving the economics at source). Usually both.
What it requires
Direct sourcing requires physical presence, ongoing relationships, and the capacity to assess quality without a catalogue description to rely on. It means visiting workshops, handling samples, and making judgements that an intermediary would otherwise make on your behalf. It also means accountability — if a piece doesn’t meet expectations, the conversation goes directly back to the maker rather than through a chain of representatives.
This is more work. It’s also more honest.
What you get
At the retail level: better value at a given price point than a conventionally supplied range of similar quality. Pieces that represent actual maker skill rather than the result of a brief written for a factory production run.
At the wholesale level: the ability to offer your customers something that isn’t available through the same distributor serving a hundred other boutiques. Direct-sourced ranges are inherently more differentiated than catalogue-sourced ones, because the selection process is singular rather than shared.
A note on transparency
Direct sourcing doesn’t automatically mean ethical sourcing. The two aren’t the same thing. At ako & sila, direct relationships with workshops means we know what we’re buying from and who is making it. That visibility is a foundation for making responsible choices — about which workshops to use, what prices to pay, and what practices to support. It doesn’t solve every question in the supply chain, but it makes the questions answerable.
The case for buying from a brand that sources directly is partly about price and partly about proximity. Knowing where a piece came from — not in the vague sense of a country of origin label, but in the specific sense of a workshop you can name — is worth something that a supply chain with seven layers between source and customer can’t offer.
If you’re sourcing for a boutique yourself, our wholesale page has the details on how we work, and we go deeper into the process in How ako & sila Sources Jewellery Across Asia.